Thanks to all who have said so many nice things about the fiction I posted here. It’s very gratifying to get appreciation for one’s children, you know.

Currently I am 80,000 words into “Babe in the Woods,” which looks likely to become my first completed novel since Messenger. I am very tempted to post it, a bit at a time, but really I should at least try to find a conventional publisher first.

“Babe in the Woods” is the story of my week at the Monroe Institute’s Gateway Voyage, 15 years ago this month. I tell people, that week in December, 1992, was the beginning of my life as a conscious being. Everything in my life changed after that, slowly or quickly, but thoroughly. (more…)

 [More browsing through old files of discarded would-be fiction.]

Chapter Two

             Henry and his brother were sitting in Henry’s car, which was sitting in Joe’s garage, out of sight of hypothetical passers-by. It was after 11. Joe’s kids were asleep, and so was Rosalie, but Henry had insisted that they adjourn to the garage, just as he had earlier asked Joe to put his own car out on the street to make room for Henry’s. “Man,” Joe had said, opening the passenger door, “if you’re worried about Rosalie and the kids spying on you, you really are paranoid.”

            Henry had replied, merely, “Cautious is as cautious does, Joe. Suppose somebody got up to go to the bathroom. No use taking chances.”

            Joe had shrugged and gotten into the car. “So what’s up?” (more…)

[Yet another beginning of a novel that links consciousness and politics and spy stuff and conspiracies.... Also unfinished, put here for those who may be amused by it.]

Slade’s Revenge

Chapter 1

This was back in 1984, before email, before cell phones, before home faxes. Hell, it was practically before answering machines. Not that any of those gadgets would have done any good. If the guy on the other end of the line doesn’t want to talk to you, it doesn’t matter. And we didn’t even have to ask, it was clear that Henry wouldn’t want to talk. So that’s why Jack Slade found himself, just at dusk, driving down a gravel road with a creek on his left side and on his right a fifty-foot ridge parallel the road, a little way back from it. He was in one of the most rural counties in Virginia, and for quite a while, even while still on the paved country road, he had mostly seen trees and not much else. Sequestered country.

He had been told “all the way to the end, and whenever the road forks, stay left,’ and he had come two and a quarter miles, and here he was. End of the road, and a little two-story wooden house nestled into the south side of the ridge. A light burning upstairs. A car parked in front of an outside wooden stairway to the second floor. Slade automatically noted that the car’s make, model and color matched what he had been given, and so did the license plate. What kind of car it was, I don’t know. Never saw it, don’t remember the description. That kind of thing doesn’t stick with me. Slade would know, though. He’ll know twenty years from now. (more…)

[The prologue from one version of Conspiracies of Men and God, my unfinished novel of politics and metaphysics.]

Prologue: The year 2000

It was the night Al Gore conceded. My wife and the girls were out Christmas shopping, and I was in my living room with the two Georges — my elder brother George and my son – watching the televised culmination of the election that wouldn’t end. Gore finished and the talking heads started. I hit the remote and the tube died.

“That’s that,” I said. “They got away with it.”

“For the moment,” my brother said.

My 28-year-old son, who came home from his first semester of college a conservative Republican and never changed, said, “What do you mean, got away with it? The court decided, so the recount’s over, and Bush wins. How can you say `they got away with it’?”

“Wasn’t hard,” I said. “Mostly a matter of practice. If you start talking early enough in life, after a while the words come out sort of automatically.”

“Oh, very funny, dad. Just because the election doesn’t go your way, the Republicans `got away with it’?”

“Not the Republicans, George,” my brother said. “The people who are using them.” (more…)

Chapter Four

I didn’t try to conceal my bewilderment. “I still don’t get it. You say you’re in deep trouble. Somebody trying to put a quarter of a million dollars in your pocket in return for letting him publish your book, offhand doesn’t come out sounding like serious bad news to me, George. Maybe I’m missing something?”

“I don’t know how far it might go, Angelo. They’ve got a lot of good people, a lot of resources. If they find me, it might get really unhealthy to know me.” He took a note out of his pocket. “Here, read this and keep it with you. If you never need it, great, but I’ll feel better knowing you have it.”

The note said: “To Carlos Santiago and his associates. I appeal to your sense of honor to leave my family unharmed. I give you my word, they will not know where I am or how to contact me. They can do you no good as hostages or as revenge, and any act against them can only produce within yourselves reason for shame and remorse, without producing the slightest benefit to you. Without bringing you in any way closer to your desires. Additionally, I assure you I am not a pacifist in the sense of being inhibited against acts of violence to protect the innocent or to so revenge them as to prevent future outrages. I realize that this must seem a puny threat, quite insignificant. Contemptible, perhaps. All I can state is that I have resources unknown to you. I would prefer not to have to use them. But I will if necessary. George Chiari.”

I tried to look at him with new eyes, as I would if I were evaluating an unknown potential news source. “If this is a bluff, George,” I said, “it’s a damned good one. It almost convinces me. (more…)

Continuing, just for fun, with bits of an unfinished novel about why George Chiari left Tibet, and what he hoped to accomplish.

Chapter Three

“You keep talking about my life being in danger. Why should it be?”

“Because of what I’ve been doing since I’ve been back.”

“You keep saying that, too. But it doesn’t answer the question. Why?”

“I need you to do some snooping for me.”

“For the paper, too, I hope?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. Not for a long time, anyway, even at best.”

“Sensitive information?”

“Dangerous information.”

“Dangerous to whom?”

“Depends on what you find out. If it’s what I think it is, dangerous to you, for finding it. You’re going to have to go after this very carefully, believe me.”

I studied him. “All right, I’ll accept that. And let’s say I dig something up, what are you going to do with it?” (more…)

Interesting thing, this blogging. I put up the text of Messenger and someone in Morocco finds it interesting and posts a couple of comments, and we exchange a couple of emails and then I realize that she has a blog, and I go visit her blog and I see why she liked Messenger, and presto, there we are full circle. Right off the bat, I saw articles on Dean Raidin, on why divination works, etc. She seems to be a nice grounded mystic, not a woo-woo true believer.

If the sort of thing I write about here interests you, take a look at her blog, margotmystic.wordpress.com.

Chapter Two

And so George returned to the family, and for a few months things were back to, shall we say, readjusted-normal. He moved in with Mom and Dad, to their great joy, and he somewhat diffidently asked Tommy if he could use another hand on the farm. Tommy, looking at George’s state of obvious fitness, said sure. They worked out some financial arrangement without any haggling or difficulty at all, so far as I ever heard, and there George was at 48, working alongside his younger brother, back in the rhythm of a farm’s final weeks before the year’s long sleep.

“It’s like he’d never been away from it,” Tommy told me over the phone one day, “except with motors. You know how George could always take motors apart and fix whatever was broken? Now he won’t deal with them at all. Isn’t that crazy?”

That beat me. “So how much does that leave him to do around the farm, if he can’t even drive a tractor?”

“Oh, he doesn’t seem to have any problem driving them. How could you forget how to drive, you know? It’s fixing them, he seems to have forgotten about. I asked him to tear down the generator motor and he wouldn’t do it. Very apologetic, said he’d be glad to do anything else I had in mind, but he couldn’t work with motors. Weird.” (more…)

Those who liked Messenger might like a few chapters I wrote that tell of George after his return. The novel was to be called Conspiracies of Men and God but it looks unlikely that I’ll ever finish it. Too much water under the bridge in real life since this was written. Just for fun, then.

Conspiracies of Men and God

Chapter One. Angelo

I wasn’t doing any real work anyway, just looking through the news wires, trying to look busy. I reached over and answered automatically, my eyes still on the terminal. “Newsroom, Angelo Chiari.”

A muffled voice. “Mr. Chiari, we need to meet.” He was almost whispering, and I’d make a tiny bet that he was talking through a handkerchief or something. People get these real clever ideas from watching movies and reading detective stories, and I suppose some of the ideas must work in real life, or they wouldn’t be used in fiction. But it gets annoying when you’re on the receiving end.
“Who’s this?”

Like he’s going to give me a straight answer. “Can you be free in half an hour?”

As it happened, I could, if I should happen to want to. The day was supposed to have gone to covering the Kellerman trial. but the judge had recessed it for the day and Charley Johnson–the city desk editor–hadn’t quite found anything that he could send me to cover. It would have to be something that wouldn’t tie me up when the trial resumed the next day–which meant it would have to be something even less exciting than the Kellerman trial, which would be a trick, but long experience told me that if I didn’t get out of sight, sooner or later Charley would remember that I worked for him. I turned from the terminal and picked up a pen; asked the guy on the phone what it was about. It didn’t surprise me in the least to hear him tell me it was something he couldn’t tell me over the phone.

“Listen, friend,” I said, “I don’t do wild geese. If I’m going to move from here, I’ve got to know what it’s about.” Joe Panella looked up from his terminal across the narrow aisle and made a wry face, looking at the ceiling. I matched his expression, and nodded. Another one, we were saying.

(more…)

A friend reminded me that I had sent him this a few months ago. I liked it then and i like it now. This comes from Fred Burks for the PEERS network and WantToKnow.info Team. I think, myself, that her day turned not when this lovely incident occurred but earlier, when she determined not to pass her bad day on to others.

Love is in the Moment
By Annie

It was early morning, yet already it had been a stupendously bad day. One thing after another. The downward spiral continued when a large pitcher of orange juice slid from my hands and smashed to the floor. Glass and sticky juice spewed to the farthest corners of the kitchen, slithering down cabinets and appliances, puddling at my feet.

Stunned, I looked at the mess. Then I dropped dejectedly down to the floor, my eyes filling with overdue tears. The tears came from begrudging and angry acceptance that “today is just not my day.”

Bad day or not, errands had to be done. Filled with angst and negative mental baggage, I got in my car to drive into town. In the few minutes it took to travel to the bank I made a decision. I would be careful not to pass my bad day off to anyone else. I would be cordial and polite. And I would NOT retaliate when that harried driver pulled quickly and rudely in front of me causing me to slam on my breaks, dumping the contents of my drink onto the front car seat!

Standing in line at the bank, I was silently talking to myself. Actually, I was scolding myself. All of the events that had accumulated and contributed to my bad day were, in reality, so very minor and trivial. I was over-reacting. I was indulging in self-pity. I tried to imagine the innumerable, individual lives that had been effected by 911, by the war in Iraq, by the tsunami.

(more…)